Wastralls: A Novel, C. A. Dawson Scott [i love reading books TXT] 📗

Trevorrick River was but a little stream to have fretted so deep a cleft between the hills as that which sloped from the main road of Tregols parish to the sea. From the source to the engulfing sands was barely a mile, and the twinkling waters, if full and fierce in winter, showed a summer fear of their own broad stepping-stones. Nevertheless the sharp declivities, the juttings of rock, even the shelves and crags and walls of Dark Head, had been formed by the gnawing of this tiny but persistent flow.

The valley ran east and west. The sun, rising beyond St. Cadic Mill, poured its noon warmth over Hember and sank behind the sheltered plateau on which stood the old home of the Rosevears. The dying beams, however, could not reach the deep-set windows of Wastralls, for the crest of Dark Head reared itself between the farmstead and the harsh threat of the Atlantic. The house lay in a fold of land, hidden equally from those who moved upon the face of the waters, and those who might be said, though their habitations were at a distance, to neighbour it. As a refuge in troublous times, the position had its value, and there were indications that this shelf of rock had been, many centuries ago, the nest of some wild brood.

Upon their heels had followed as descendants or conquerors—the script is too nearly obliterated to be read—men who in their own strong person represented the law. The gate-posts of Wastralls were crowned with the egg-shaped stones which indicated that it was a manor-house, and that its owner had the right to dispense justice. Within the house, and occupying a space from wall to wall, was the ancient Justice Room; but its stately uses had long been abated, its irrevocable decisions had lost their force, in the autumn of its days it had become a lumber-room and more lately a bedchamber.

A century ago, from the mill at the head of the valley to the Wreckers' Hut on the foreshore, Trevorrick had been the property of one man. Of peasant stock, how Freathy Rosevear came by land and money was matter of surmise. 'He had gone out one morning a poor man, and had come home rich.' Little need, however, to invent tales of hidden treasure, witchcraft, divination, when the caves in Morwen Cove made so safe a store-house: when the Wreckers' Hut stood behind the teeth of the Mad Rip: when the lanes that converged upon the towns—the towns in which queer commodities could always be sold—were so deep and secret. Whatever the sources of his income, as fortunes went, in that remote district, Freathy Rosevear was accounted wealthy. He was also a man to take the eye. Big, florid, fair, he might have stepped out of a Holbein canvas, and tales of his unusual strength were told and retold of a winter's evening in the cottages. Did his wife complain the store of wreck was running low? Forthwith he had gone out, caught the first of the homing donkeys, and carried it, load and all, into her presence, with "A fardel for my Lady"—so the story.

The man was as Saul to a kingless folk, a head and shoulders above the multitude. Like the last of the Tudor monarchs he brought the people among whom he lived material well-being, and, like other outstanding personalities, stamped his impress on the current coin. Before he died he was "Old Squire" and, as such, he lived in the long memory of the countryside. Not that to them his death was the final exit from the stage of his influence and activities. Though they followed him to his burying, though they saw the sods falling earth to earth, they could not believe that abundant, penetrating, imperial vitality could be resolved into its elements. Recognizing that neither heaven nor hell was the fitting place for it, they showed their faith in the life after death by a hardy belief that Old Squire, though rendered invisible, was still among them.

When this man's grip upon Trevorrick relaxed, the land fell to his three legitimate sons: for his other children, and he had done his part in peopling the neighbourhood, he had provided during his life. The legitimate sons, Freathy, Constantine, and Tom, were good farmers all, but cast in an ordinary mould. They lived, they replenished the earth and, in the fullness of time, went back to it, dust to dust. A younger Constantine now owned the mill, a younger Tom tilled the fat slopes of Hember, and Wastralls, the cradle of the race, was become the property of Freathy's only child, his daughter Sabina. Every rood of land in the valley was still Rosevear property, and the cousins, shut in by their hill boundaries, formed a community conscious at once of its kinship and its isolation.

Of the three farms, Wastralls was the largest and most important. Across the valley were wide commons—the wastralls—once bare, blown sand, but now converted by spire grass into turf for the fattening of red-brown bullocks. On the heavy land between the house and the little stream were orchards and cornfields, while behind the cliffs, tethered in pairs to prevent them being blown over the edge, a flock of sheep nibbled the short grass. The manor itself was a low two-storied oblong of country stone and, with its courts and outhouses, seemed as much an excrescence of the rocky ground as more solid outcroppings. A grey irregularity by day, it sank, when twilight fell, into its surroundings. At dawn St. Cadic Mill was a black tower against the saffron; at dusk Hember windows flamed with reflections of the west; but both at dawn and dusk Wastralls was more a presumption than a fact. The house was older than Hember, older than the mill, and its obscurity suggested that the forgotten builder had hoped the Storm-god might take Wastralls in his stride, that Death might fail, among so many grey swells and hummocks, to distinguish it.

The place had been built to house two families. A dividing wall cut the fine chambers on the western front from the low-pitched rooms that looked across the yard. A green door, stout and with a heavy lock, was set in the dividing wall to allow of communication between the old-time lord of the manor and the bailiff who tilled his fields; but the families, living back to back, having different modes of egress and ingress, the one taking the field path, the other the road, preserved each its privacy. When Old Squire brought a wife to Wastralls, she, preferring the homeliness of the farmstead, had made it their dwelling-place. From thenceforward the life of the house centred in the roomy, whitewashed kitchen; and the fine chambers, swept and shuttered, were only used on ceremonial occasions. Old Squire had no use for state or trappings and when his son Freathy reigned in his stead, the lesser man asked no greater luxury than had satisfied his sire.

This second Freathy married a woman so indistinct that it was a wonder he had seen her sufficiently well to fall in love. She ruled Wastralls with a boneless hand, and used her knees for praying rather than scrubbing. Of this vague, colourless creature was born the vital bright-haired Sabina. Her father welcomed her as a beginning, "first a maid and then a child," but his wife's effort left her exhausted. The tonic air of the valley made it difficult for her to die, but she failed a little, month by month, until, unnoticed, she was able to slip into her grave. Freathy's thought was "must marry again, try to get a boy; 'twon't do to let a maid be heir of the land." But he was comfortable as a widower, more comfortable than he had been during Dusha's pious, slatternly existence and, Time, the inexorable, drew the daisy quilt about his neck, while he yet procrastinated.

For lack of a son Freathy had taken his daughter with him about the farm. His thoughts being of the cattle-market, of soils and crops, it was of such matters that he spoke; and Sabina picked up the lore of the seasons as naturally as another child learns to sew and cook. Her father was a man who drank, not continuously, but at intervals which, like a perspective of posts, showed diminishing interspaces. The child accepted his habits as she accepted rain and shine and, when he was under the influence of liquor, did her young best to grapple with his duties. By the time he died—from the effects of a night spent inadvertently in the open—she had gathered a little store of experience, had indeed been farming Wastralls for over a year. Freathy, intending to remarry and leave hearty sons, had not troubled to make a will and the girl of one-and-twenty succeeded to an unencumbered freehold of five hundred acres, the manor-house and what remained of Old Squire's savings.

Offers of help came from both Hember and St. Cadic. Each was willing to work Wastralls with his own land, each hoped Sabina might listen to a cousinly tale of love. She, however, having inherited the robust confidence of her grandfather, was determined to undertake on her own account the adventure of farming. Nor were Tom and Constantine Rosevear altogether surprised. They had not played with her as children without recognizing her quality; and if they wondered 'what hand she'd make of it,' it was as those whose hearts prophesy unto them.

The brothers who had inherited Hember and St. Cadic had died young, but each had left a son. Tom, the owner of Hember, thought that as its fields marched with those of Wastralls, he ought to marry his cousin; while Constantine sought her because the glint of her bright hair had dazzled him. A fine maid was Sabina, blue eyes flush with rounded cheeks, not the passionate eyes of Old Squire, but the blue of ice-depths when the sun is shining in a clear sky; and when it was a question of marriage she found the straight sticks who offered themselves for weapon and support were of a too familiar wood. She would go a little farther into the forest.